Meanwhile, back at the farm

If you follow my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/mikefarmer) you know that I’ve been talking a lot about a Rexburg tweetup.  What is a tweetup?  For me, a tweetup is an opportunity get a bunch of twitter followers and friends together to A) put a face with the name/handle and B) talk about how my twitter friends are implementing technology in their work and school experiences.

On Friday, January 23 Joseph Mclaughlin and I organized and held our first Rexbug tweetup.  We simply advertised to all of our twitter followers when the get-together would be and a little of what to expect.  To our surprise, we had a fabulous turn-out.  We had 16 people join us for the tweetup. Also, since we are geeks, we recorded the tweetup on both ustream.tv and qik.com.  Here are the links:

• Qik: http://qik.com/video/909720
• ustream.tv: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1085346

The tweetup was a little slow at first but we soon settled in discussing the purpose of a tweetup, technologies used in the classroom (Google Docs), Qik, and WordPress.  If you have any interest in those topics and how they can be applied to an educational setting, I would encourage you to watch either the Qik or ustream feed. They are both about an hour long.

I would call the tweetup a huge success based on a few observations:

• Everyone that attended had a great time and was anxious to not only do it again, but to invite others to attend future tweetups
• Over the weekend there was much more dialog on twitter amongst those that attended the tweetup. This dialog was meaningful and productive.
• We had a lot of suggestions about what topics we should talk about in future tweetups as well as how we could improve the discussion.

This shows that we have people who are willing to engage in interesting discussion and that they want to do it on a regular basis.  In fact, we will soon be launching a simple web site that will be the “home” of the Rexburg tweetup.  From there you will be able to get a summary of each tweetup and watch recorded tweetups.  I look forward to seeing the site launch and get rolling.

If you would like to participate in our tweetups in the future, you can.  The only requirement is that you have an interest in discussing technology and that you keep the discussion clean.  We will try to broadcast all our tweetups live via Qik and/or ustream.tv in the future.  I like ustream because of the chat backchannel that allows our viewers to participate in the discussion.  If you want to see a list of twitterers in the Rexburg area follow @rexburg and see the follwers list.  We will announce the next tweetup via twitter through that user.

Thanks again to everyone who came and participated. We had a lot of fun and I look forward to our next tweetup in a couple of weeks.

I’ve moved my blog over to my new site http://michaelfarmer.info

Have a look around. It’s nothing too special so far.  I’ll be keeping my old blog at http://backatthefarm.blogspot.com until I’m sure I’m going to stick with WordPress on GoDaddy.  So far I love WordPress, hate GoDaddy.  We’ll see how it goes.